Changing the way we see the world

Adriaan Bekman, initiator of IMO, handed over the leadership in September this year. He wrote a statement.

'During centuries we have been living as individuals in natural communities that have been directed by religious, political and entrepreneurial organisms and their leaders. We got used to the fact that others decided over critical aspects of our personal life. Churches prescribed the inner and family life, politics prescribed societal behaviour and entrepreneurial life prescribed our economic behaviour.
However after world-war 2 it was described by different authors that all institutionalized organisms have lost their basic power over the soul of the human being and the soul of the communities we are part of. Auschwitz has become the symbol for this destruction of all that held humanity together.
The traditional roots have been cut and our souls have entered empty spaces.
It seems that the practical and moral steering of these institutions and its leaders is no longer so dominantly working and steering in the souls of people.

I see that people all around the world are primarily busy with giving their personal life shape and form and sense. They participate in a multitude of communities in which they share common interests. Religious, political and economic institutions are more and more getting on a distance for our personal life and our life interest.
The churches loose their power while people do not come there anymore so often or at all and they do not believe anymore in the dogma’s prescribing our lives.
Political parties have lost their original emancipatory impulses out of which they started because of the multitude of societal developments, technical, moral and social developments that changed our perceptions of good and bad and changed our life practice 24 hours, 7 days a week. To be ‘left-wing’ or to be ‘right-wing’ in todays political behaviour and ideologies is no longer a clear orientation for peoples choices.
The entrepreneurial organisms have become managed institutes that have created a gap between the people that steer and the people that do the work. Only a diminishing minority of people have still a life long personal commitment to an organisation.

Over centuries human beings have been striving to individualize their lives, to become unique individual personalities and to emancipate from the bonds that the traditional institutes created to keep the individual in the context they offered. I see this development going all around the world and it slowly but steadily disconnects peoples lives with institutional community lives. This means also that the three fundamental soul channels of the human being during the last centuries, being religion, art and science are not offering in their institutionalized forms any more the security for having the right values, beliefs and convictions. What was true yesterday could be false tomorrow.

The consequence of all this is that we have to start to take the steering wheel in our own hands and find our way in life together with the people we connect to in the communities we are part of. As we are still part of the natural community like family and origin, as we still are moving through the organized life being worker and client, we have to start our own community of people that we want to travel with during our lives and in which together we help each other to find the way in life. It can be a family member, a colleague, a client, a partner that becomes part of my personal community and who is able during a long time out of freedom to support me in my path and vice versa.
The institutional organisms like church, politics and business can create the necessary infrastructure to support this development. It is not a matter anymore of defining and steering the life of people in the wider community, but it is the finding of the right infrastructure, like schools, hospitals, banks, local governments, roads, trains and plains that in a substantial and sustainable way support people to do their process in their self chosen communities.

The self chosen and created communities can help us to overcome the traditional boundaries between us like religion, political beliefs, natural differences and to create a life together for the good of mankind and for our personal well-being.
In particular this all needs a change in mentality in the boardrooms of all these societal institutes. The old rules and regulations do not work fruitful, the old behaviour of ‘we up here’ and ‘you down there’ is not working well enough to save society for nature and social disasters we are more and more facing.

We all have to start to show leadership in our lives and learn to communicate with each other as leaders. I become part of the human creation and can play my role in it with the support of the others, my companions that trust and guide me. We can learn to deal with the failures we make and to improve our life practices through feedback and support of the others.
It is our duty to support new generations in finding their way in this complex and fast changing societies and communities and we can do this by supporting them in developing leadership skills to lead their own lives and the co-living with others and to participate in a constructive way in the community life that they are part of.
The key leadership skill in this is to learn to support the other person in finding the next step in his life and work and to respond to the support others give you in creating your life. For this dialogic behaviour we can share fundamental values of humanity, of being human. Out of freedom, in respect to the other and in love to what we try to accomplish together we together can find a path for creating a better world.'

1 Comment

Nico Delfine
on October 29, 2018 at 10:37 am

I think that there is a very strong connection between religion, political beliefs and the entrepreneurial mindset, especially in those societies and cultures based on revealed religions.
In my opinion structured religious institutions tend to influence the way we place ourselves in society and the way we act in organizations and in our daily life when we connect to the others.
My inner question is the following: is God over us or is HE/SHE among us ?
We should make a step forward going beyond religion in order to feed our spirituality every day.
Revealed religions follow a vertical path (top-down, bottom-up), on the other hand spirituality embraces open and multidimensional space.
This new perspective gives substance to the ultimate level of our mindfulness with the chance to experience the world and human beings horizontal.
Changing paradigm does not mean denying our beliefs but enriching our soul to contribute to the real growth of companies and communities.